The vendemmia: the ritual that bring Italy to a halt every september

There is a scent that, in September, slips into the houses of Italy's hill towns without asking permission. It is sweet, slightly sour, unmistakable: it is the mosto, the freshly pressed grape must fermenting in the cellars, and for anyone who grew up among the vines it is the very smell of early autumn. 

It arrives together with a precise sound, that of tractors rolling down the dirt roads at dawn with trailers heaped with grapes, and with a different light, lower and more golden, that makes the vineyards look almost unreal.

The vendemmia, the grape harvest, is the one moment of the year when an entire community works to the same rhythm. Grandparents go back to the vineyard, grandchildren skip a day of school with their parents' blessing, neighbours lend each other crates and shears, and at lunchtime, under a pergola or in the courtyard of the cantina, everyone eats together what the women of the house prepared the night before. This is not folklore, or at least not entirely, not yet. In many parts of Italy it is simply the way things are done, and always have been.

A calendar written by the grapes, not by people

The first thing to understand is that the vendemmia has no date. It has a window, and the grapes decide when that window opens. Every grape variety reaches its own balance of sugar, acidity and tannin ripeness at a different moment, and the grower's job is to catch it at exactly that point, neither before nor after. Grapes destined for sparkling wine are picked first, because they need lively acidity and moderate alcohol. Aromatic whites follow close behind. The great reds built for ageing, the ones that need ripe tannins and rich skins, close the season, often when the first mists have already settled.

This is why the harvest in Italy lasts almost three months and sweeps across the country like a wave. In 2026, according to a survey of the wine consortia carried out by Gambero Rosso's weekly Tre Bicchieri, Trentino started picking in the week before Ferragosto, the mid-August holiday; in the Prosecco DOC, pinot and chardonnay were harvested between 15 and 25 August; in Chianti DOCG the harvest began around 10 September with trebbiano and vermentino; while in Abruzzo the montepulciano waits until the second half of the month. In Piedmont, for the Moscato of the Acqui area, Coldiretti, Italy's main farmers' association, recorded a start in early August rather than around Ferragosto as tradition dictates.

The most striking fact, however, is another one. This year, for the first time, Assoenologi, Ismea and Unione Italiana Vini decided not to publish any national harvest forecast at all, postponing every figure until after the picking is done, with the official vintage declaration expected in mid-November. The stated reason is a climate too erratic to allow reliable estimates. For reference, the last harvest officially reported by the Italian ministry to the European Commission, the 2025 vintage, closed at 44.4 million hectolitres, a volume that confirms Italy as the world's largest wine producer.

From the romans to the cantine sociali: two thousand years of ritual

The Romans already knew that the harvest was a sacred matter before it was an agricultural one. On 19 August they celebrated the Vinalia Rustica, the festival that officially opened the picking season in Latium. It was the flamen Dialis, the priest of Jupiter, who cut the first bunch and offered it to the god as first fruits, together with the sacrifice of a lamb. Only after that gesture could the farmers enter the vineyards. The festival was also dedicated to Venus, and the legend explaining its origin went back to the war between Aeneas and Turnus: Aeneas promised Jupiter the fruit of the following harvest, and won.

For centuries, from the Middle Ages through the mezzadria sharecropping system, the vendemmia remained collective work out of necessity. No farming family could pick the grapes of an entire estate alone in a few days, and swapping working days with neighbours was the rule. The cantina, in that world, was a room of the house, and wine was part of the wages paid in kind.

The turning point came at the end of the nineteenth century with a new idea: pooling not just the labour, but the cellar itself. Italy's first cantina sociale, a cooperative winery, was founded in 1891 in Oleggio, in the province of Novara, following the example of the German cooperatives. The second, in Gattinara, opened in 1908 and is still today the oldest original cooperative winery in operation. The cooperative model allowed small growers to afford equipment, oenologists and markets they would never have reached alone, and changed forever the relationship between the farmer and his wine.

What really happens between the vineyard and the cellar

The moment a bunch is cut from the vine, a race against time begins. Hand-picked grapes, laid in shallow crates so the berries are not crushed, must reach the cellar within a few hours, before heat and oxygen trigger unwanted fermentation. Machine harvesting is faster and cheaper, but for many appellations and for almost all small artisan producers the human hand remains irreplaceable: only those who harvest by hand can choose bunch by bunch, leaving on the vine what is not yet ready.

In the cellar the paths diverge immediately. For whites, the grapes are pressed gently and the must ferments on its own, separated from the skins, to preserve freshness and aroma. For reds, the must ferments together with the skins, and it is precisely this contact, which can last from a few days to several weeks, that gives colour, tannin and structure. Destemming, the separation of the berries from the stalk, and crushing are the first steps; then the yeasts do the rest, turning sugar into alcohol.

This is where you understand why an artisan bottle costs what it costs. Behind it are days of hand-picking, strict selection in the vineyard, yields per hectare kept deliberately low by the producer, and a full year of waiting, often more, before the wine is ready. None of this is visible on the label, but all of it can be tasted in the glass.

The vendemmia today: who does it, how it is changing

The 2026 harvest tells the story of how Italian winegrowing is changing. According to Coldiretti, picking started on average ten days earlier than in recent years because of the summer's record temperatures, and in some areas this is the earliest harvest ever recorded. The consortia report advances of five to ten days almost everywhere, from Trentino to the Maremma, from Lambrusco country to the Marche. The health of the grapes, however, is generally good, because the heat held back fungal diseases, and the expected quality is high nearly everywhere.

It is not only the dates that are changing. Several consortia have chosen to voluntarily reduce yields per hectare, Chianti DOCG by twenty per cent, to rebalance a market where stocks are high and consumption is falling. It is an important signal: picking less in order to pick better, and the vendemmia becoming once again an act of choice rather than mere quantity.

Meanwhile, almost paradoxically, the harvest as a collective ritual is enjoying a second youth. The grape festivals invented in the twentieth century to bring city dwellers into the countryside are more alive than ever. The Sagra dell'Uva in Marino, near Rome, born in 1925 from an idea of the poet Leone Ciprelli, is still celebrated on the first Sunday of October, when for one hour the town's fountains pour wine instead of water, a "miracle" that even fascinated the writer Carlo Emilio Gadda, who described it in 1934. The Festa dell'Uva in Impruneta, on the Chianti hills, turns exactly one hundred this year: founded in 1926 as a showcase of local farm produce, it has become a contest between the town's four rioni, the historic neighbourhoods, which spend months secretly building allegorical floats to parade on the last Sunday of September. Those who have no family vineyard, today, go looking for the vendemmia this way.

The glass that tells the story of september

At the end of all this work, this waiting and these choices, a bottle remains. And if the vendemmia is the moment when a territory is concentrated into a bunch of grapes, wine is the way that territory reaches our table. You do not need a vineyard to take part in the ritual: you only need to choose carefully who you buy from.

In the wine selection at 360ItalyMarket you will find labels from small producers who still harvest by hand and ship directly from their own cantina. The sparkling wines from native grape varieties are the first children of every harvest, picked while the fruit is still taut and fresh. The reds that close the season carry the last warm days of October inside them. And grappa, distilled from the vinacce, the pomace left after pressing, is the harvest's second life, the way rural tradition has always refused to throw anything away.

September, in Italy, tastes of mosto. Bringing it to the table is the simplest way to become part of a story two thousand years long.